Too cruel NCSoft. Too cruel by half. That’s the Statesman, one of the iconic superpowered characters from City of Heroes, repurposed for NCSoft’s upcoming Master X Master. It’s a MOBA, and NCSoft figured they could attract fans of their superhero MMO, (shuttered in 2012) to their latest venture by dredging up the corpse of one of the beloved main characters from Paragon City. A closed beta for Master X Master starts on April 6th and runs until the 27th.
This is Orisa. She’s the newest character added to Overwatch. Her appearance as a four-legged mech makes it easy to remember that she’s a tank-class character. Armed with a main weapon that deals large amounts of constant damage while slowing her movement, Orisa is the classic heavy. Being an Overwatch combatant means she also comes with an extensive backstory. She’s a Nigerian-made security robot that’s been adopted and reprogrammed by an eleven-year-old girl named Efi Oladele. Overwatch’s numerous porn fans are probably chomping at the bit to use Orisa in their creations. Good luck making that robo-centaur sexy.
Orisa should be live in Overwatch today, although Blizzard is keeping her off the Competitive Play roster while they work out her balance.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Some people get in a car and drive to a remote location to have a horror movie. The location is modest, self-contained, and not nearly as impressive as it should be. The cast is small, of varying degrees of attractiveness, and not particularly talented. The script has no interesting ideas. The director has no insight. The movie is terrible. You stop watching it halfway through. It will be frozen in your Netflix account at the 40-minute mark forever.
The Snare is this with a twist: the script does have interesting ideas and the director does have insight. The movie isn’t terrible. It’s not particularly good, but it’s certainly not terrible. It sneaks decisively past the 40-minute mark.
Writer/director C.A. Cooper is working with limited resources. A third of his cast is sedate to a fault. The other two thirds are grating. The location is hilarious. The script calls for an isolated holiday getaway, but all the production can manage is someone’s two-bedroom flat. So it’s up to the cast to pretend they’ve totally found an awesome place to hang out for a few days. It even has a TV set with a 14″ screen! Sweet! The exterior is carefully framed to exclude the apartment buildings next door. From the balcony, you can see the neighboring buildings. Anyone trapped up here could just yell to the next house over to call the fire department to bring a ladder.
But if the model for most bad horror is seminal crowd-pleasers like Friday the 13th, Paranormal Activity, or The Exorcist, the model for The Snare is The Shining. This is a director who hasn’t just seen The Shining, but he understands it and he uses it as a template for a nasty little tale about rotting away. Despite his limited resources, he knows how to shoot and construct a creepy slow-burn that relies on unnerving instead of startling. He prefers sickly instead of lurid, nauseous instead of gorey, decay instead of violence. Cooper knows to get under your skin instead of in your face. Someone give this man a better cast and a bigger budget.
Train Sim, that internet meme machine from Dovetail Games, has finally upgraded to a new engine. Train Sim World: CSX Heavy Haul, their latest ode to locomotive fans, runs on Unreal Engine 4 and features a first-person mode so virtual engineers can simulate ambling around the train yard. While players have complained for years about Train Sim’s proprietary engine’s quirks and sometimes primitive graphics, the Unreal Engine changeover is not receiving unanimous praise. Longtime franchise players agree that the game looks quite a bit better than before, but criticism centers on steeper hardware requirements, inconsistent framerates, and some spotty rendering. While some issues were fixed in the beta program, the final release features some carryover and some new complaints. A reminder, perhaps, that progress comes with a cost – as most railroad tycoons could tell you.
Train Sim World: CSX Heavy Haul comes with the “Sand Patch Grade” route and three locomotives. There’s no word on DLC just yet, but based on Dovetail Games’ history, rail nuts can expect plenty of offerings to come down the line.
We watch the winner of this year’s Make Us Watch Whatever You Want Fund Drive! Or do we? At the 1:11-mark, we touch on a few of our favorite moments of contact in movies.
Ghost Recon Wildlands is what it would be like if Disney World had a section called Shootland. A swathe of geography dedicated to the theme of shooting guns, expensive looking, consisting of simple and contrived thrills interspersed with waiting in line, built to impress in a compressed burst rather than entertain over the long run. Great place to visit, sure.
Rebellion’s glorious X-ray headshot simulator, Sniper Elite 4, will get its first chunk of DLC on March 21st. Deathstorm Part 1: Inception is the first of three “mini-campaign” DLC installments coming for the game. Set in Northern Italy, the expansion mission will task players with infiltrating a secret Nazi naval base to secure a mysterious MacGuffin codenamed Deathstorm. The mission is playable as a strictly single player affair, or snipers can team up for cooperative shenanigans. Additionally, the Night Fighter DLC pack will release on the same day, adding night-time camouflage skins, two new characters, and three new weapons. Both DLC bits will be available separately, or as part of the season pass at “around” the same time.
There’s free content coming as well! A new Night Woods multiplayer map, and an elimination mode are being released at no charge to owners of the base game.
Check out Tom Chick and Jason McMaster playing Sniper Elite 4 together here.
Sid Meier’s Civilization VI has been out for a few months and gotten some patches and DLC. It’s Civilization VI, so you want it, but based on some assessments, you may not be certain it’s for you. 2K and Firaxis have a partial solution to your dilemma. A sixty turn demo is now available on Steam. The sample will put you in charge of China’s Qin Shi Huang. Sixty turns may not seem like much, but that’s plenty of time for you to watch the AI-controlled units logjam into each other while national leaders bounce randomly between diplomatic states.
One of the skills you can unlock in Ghost Recon Wildlands is thermal vision, which highlights warmer objects from everything else in your view with splashes of red, orange, and yellow. The image above shows regular vision in a hunting lodge on the left and what you see in the same room with thermal vision enabled on the right. Notice the stuffed animals? Unless they practice taxidermy very differently in Bolivia, this can’t be right.
How do you beef up sales for a game that was overlooked when it launched? Update the game with a free horde mode. That’s exactly what’s happening with THQ Nordic’s The Dwarves. Unfairly or not, the real-time tactical battle hero game from developer KING Art was lost in the holiday shuffle of 2016 and the publisher is looking to remedy that with some goodwill support. The latest free update features three different challenges on six maps. There’s the aforementioned horde mode with wave-based enemy attacks, a timed challenge that encourages players to kill all opponents as fast as possible, and a chase mode that has the player running down a wayward orc. Leaderboards will add a competitive incentive along with persistent stats that can unlock the game’s 15 heroes for use in the new modes.
Writer/director Julia Ducournau’s spectacular debut movie, Raw, will get lumped in with a genre known as body horror, which is where gross stuff happens to someone’s body. That’s too bad, because it’s a genre rife with cheap gore, shock value for shock value’s sake, and godawful movies that seem awfully proud of the point they’re trying to make, much like a toddler would be proud of a bowel movement. And there’s really not a lot of room for subtlety in body horror. No one ever accused David Cronenberg of subtlety.
But Raw’s body horror is not its priority. It is only its vehicle. Raw is less interetsed in the grossness of biology than the urges that drive it. Like Prevenge, an upcoming (and unfortunately not very good) movie about pregnancy, Raw considers the unique dilemma of women besieged by the primal force of, well, biology. Although it doesn’t shy away from explicit gore, it skips past what would have been its goriest scenes. Not just because imagination is more powerful. An unforgettable and thunderously scored epiphany scene doesn’t leave much to the imagination. But because a fundamental facet of sexuality, over and above any act, is identity. Not what you’ve done, but what you feel. What you want.
I both have and haven’t said enough. The average review of Raw will ruin at least two of its reveals. Every trailer I’ve seen will ruin about a half dozen. Finding out what Raw is about is best left to Ducournau’s confident, stylish, and unnerving filmmaking, and actress Garance Merillier with her Rose Byrne doe eyes.
Although Raw isn’t ultimately body horror, it does earn a place in French extremism, which is just a fancy way of saying, “Damn, there are some people from France who really get horror!” Like Martyrs, still a bleeding edge of French extremism, Raw is about three or four things by the time it’s over, each building on the other in unexpected ways. But unlike Martyrs — or anything else in French extremism — Raw is curiously poignant, even tender. Heh, tender. Now I’ve said too much.
That’s all of 1996’s Pokemon Red recreated in Minecraft. That’s not just the environments, or the characters, frozen in Minecraft like a blocky Madame Tussaud’s. As impressive as that would be, this is the full original Gameboy game faithfully (some would say obsessively) programmed into Minecraft with no mods used. That’s 357,000 command blocks stamped out over 21 months for Reddit user MrSquishy to make his mark in history. You can grab the map yourself to try out in Minecraft. The creator warns people that his Pokemon recreation requires a bit more resources than the normal Minecraft map, and there may be some bugs, although some are intentionally recreating glitches from the original handheld game.
That image is from Big Star Games’ upcoming game based on the Reservoir Dogs. You remember the diner assault in Reservoir Dogs, right? What about the shootout at the docks? How about the time-bending powers? Well, you’re going to see them in Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days for the Xbox One and PC later this year. Take a dash of Hotline Miami’s overhead ultra-violence and mix with a dash of 2014’s Super Time Force and you get a Reservoir Dogs that gives the criminals the power to rewind time and do-over bits of their heists.
Say Mr. Orange holds up a car for the getaway and gets shot in the gut. Hit the “Time Back” power and the player can now control Mr. White, and armed with foreknowledge and a big gun, he can go around the other side of the car and kill the driver before she shoots. Tragically, that means the rest of the story will be very different from the one in the movie, but destiny will likely force Michael Madsen to dance to Stuck in the Middle With You no matter how much you mess with the timeline.
We go over all the submissions for the 2017 Make Us Watch Whatever You Want Fund Drive starting at the 1:45 mark, but first we had to talk about that King Kong movie they just made. At the 1:06-mark, Kellywand makes us talk about erections in movies.
Next week: listen at the two-hour mark to find out!
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on– Oh, look, a massive update for No Man’s Sky! Look at all that new stuff: base building, creation sharing, ship collecting, class specialization, land vehicles and exocraft, races, new stuff to buy, new stuff to build, new ways to shoot at things, meaningful survival mechanics, permadeath. Permadeath! The thing that makes all games even more replayable! Even persistence for the various places you’ve discovered, such as Wlkjtulappd, and Berlkdipbiesy, and Yiplyustokpydy. As you recall, those are all planets in the Bfeudisklonklorrl system. Remember the Bfeudisklonklorrl system? Remember all its purple planets with their pink skies? Yiplyustokpydy was definitely my favorite. I guess if I’m going back, I should rename it to something like Chickworld or Tomholme or Yes Album Cover #317.
The update also includes the obligatory visual improvements, such as horizon based ambient occlusion. Whatever that is, it’s something that wasn’t in No Man’s Sky before.
Scroll through this splashy page to see what Hello Games has done to their aimless game-less space game. Because from where I’m standing, waiting on the Steam download to finish, it looks as if there might be an actual game in there now.
